A Drummondville, Quebec based swine veterinarian reports piglet vaccines have been by far the most effective defense against porcine circovirus associated disease.

Porcine circovirus associated disease, triggered by porcine circovirus type 2, can be characterized by a wide variety of clinical signs ranging from respiratory symptoms, to reproductive failure to reduced productivity to death, with mortality reaching as high as ten percent in some operations.

The severity of symptoms will often vary depending on the presence of other disease such as porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome or mycoplasma.

Dr. Francoise Cardinal, on hand for the Banff Pork Seminar, says the introduction of new vaccines combined with improved management practices have been extremely effective in controlling this disease.

Clip-Dr. Francois Cardinal-Les Consultants Avi-Porc

For sure piglet PCV2 vaccination works very very well.

By itself it's the single most useful tool we have.

It's the most effective and just by itself it has reduced the mortality to what it was before.

But, by the time we had the disease and the time we got the vaccines, we've improved management, we fight other diseases and now what we see is the results of all of those changes at the farm level and the PCV2 vaccination.

So we see now mortality is less than what it was before the PCVAD outbreak.

There are three vaccines available in Canada, two which are administered to the piglet and one which is administered to the sow and an additional piglet vaccine is expected to become available shortly.

Dr. Cardinal says, in his experience, the piglet vaccines have been more effective than the sow vaccine and he stresses it is still important to maintain good biosecurity protocols to keep PCVAD and other diseases under control.